The High Life

His wife, Ina May, president of the Midwives Alliance of North America, predicts that she would be "an unruly First Lady." She would turn the Lincoln Bedroom into a birth center for the poor. She would grow hemp in the Rose Garden, all meals at the White House would be vegetarian, and she'd teach a Secret Service agent to braid her hair. When asked if she has intern concerns, she replies, "No, we'll do the blowjobs in every room." Her husband will be left to explain to the media, "I can't control her. You try."

The Cannabis Cup has become a big event in Amsterdam. In 1993, there were 52 attendees; this year, more than 2,000. But the centerpiece is still the competition in which the coffee shops enter their finest wares to be judged. In the early years, there were celebrity judges. Later on, anybody attending the Cup could be a judge, and that resulted in equal-opportunity bribery in the form of free pot. But this year the coffee-shop owners themselves are the judges, and the 16 brand-name entries have been coded, so that it will be a blind competition. "We truly don't know who's gonna win," Hager promises. The only complaint is that coffee-shop owners are expected to smoke too much cannabis.

For many, the first joint they smoke automatically becomes the winner, because everything after that one is difficult to distinguish. There is no surcease of euphoria, no time to savor one strain of marijuana or anticipate the next. This is not like wine tasting, where the wine is spit out between tastes. At least in the aroma-therapy booth coffee beans are whiffed between each new fragrance, to neutralize the olfactory sense. Ultimately, though, a winning strain of marijuana, Super Silver Haze from the Green House coffee shop, is selected. It is the ultimate irony of this whole affair that an herb that promotes a sense of cooperation is this week being inhaled in such an aura of competition.

Ah, but I am jaded. Indeed, my cannabis cup runneth over. An issue of High Timesonce included a questionnaire asking, among other things, "Is it possible to smoke too much pot?" A reader responded, "I don't understand the question."

Paul Krassner'sImpolite Interviews (Seven Stories Press) andPot Stories for the Soul (High Times Press) have just been published.